Ana

By Amy

Remembering a Friend Is To Harvest a Spare Skeleton

I can’t make a garden grow
The sun isn’t close enough
We’re not even supposed to look.
Won’t ever feel what makes us so warm,
Or everybody tells us so.

Once when I was five,
I saw a balloon blow up.
I picked a red one out at dinner,
I may even have finished my children’s meal,
Back then I could do things like finish a meal
Now I plod through ends of knives like a fish without its bones
Trying to navigate what will make him healthy,
But they already said he was spineless
So it wouldn’t matter now if he grew two skeletons

I carried my balloon out of the restaurant on the corner
Even still in my mind the street is bigger than a movie screen
But the sky was even bigger
And on the map it’s just some dust swept under the rug
I stood and stared up and up
My parents walked me to the car,
I made them stop,
I needed air,
And I let the balloon go.

Mom said that an animal would choke on it and not to do that again
I started to cry
I said it was for my friend Ana
My mom said that she’d probably get it
And that Ana was lucky and so was I for having known her before she almost made it to six years old
But deep down I wondered if she was the luckiest
I thought about the coyote in the desert halfway across the country that would choke on my balloon,
I climbed into the car and
Put my seatbelt on.